Showing posts with label paving stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paving stone. Show all posts

Thursday 16 July 2020

It's a Cutlure thing


The streets of the toon were all kivvered aroon
Wi' stuff that was colourful, gowden and broon,
It was put there, of course, by a big Clydesdale horse!
And they called it manyura, manyura manyah!
                                                                                                        Matt McGinn


Readers of this delightful and informative journal will recall that the streets of Hull town centre were, at great expense both of money and inconvenience, recently changed from small paving bricks to slightly larger paving slabs. How proud those who consider such things were to have such a wonderful and attractive pavement for folk to walk about and browse the shopping "offer" of the town.  This however is the City of Cutlure (extended due to force majeure until May next year, Coventry due to be the next victim of this stupidity is scared the Covey will put folk off visiting, can't think why that might the case... Cutlure is staying) so it came as no great surprise to find the streets of the town had developed a nasty case of white-spot disease with Jameson Street, King Edward Street and good old Queen Vicky Square affected by a plague of painted dots. I guess that the council imagined that vast hordes would descend upon the place and, with the then Government policy of 2m distancing being the rule (sorry, guideline), folk would need help in judging how far apart to stand. How this was supposed to work I can't imagine: was there to be synchronised hopping from dot to dot? Would you wait until the next spot was clear or just proceed until you came up against an occupied place and stand, possibly on one leg and whistling Dixie, until you could go about your business. It was, of course, absurd, panic from the pretendy powers-that-be. No-one took a blind bit of notice of them and tell the truth there's hardly enough folk to make a crowd (two's company ...)  wandering around the  mainly closed shopping areas.
The fad for surgical masks and gloves, I believe the collective term for this is PPE, means that there is a novel (and completely unexpected, who'da thought ... tsk, tsk) litter problem. 



Friday 21 June 2019

Nunc pro tunc


Ah the old injunction: learn from the past ... but whose past are we to learn from? Historians being human beings like ourselves tell tales like us and have to pay their bills like us and so write their histories not with any degree of impartiality or objectivity but to put bread on their table. They'll twist the past to fit the present (and vice versa), make up a glorious past, tell and sell outright lies just to suit their own or their master's ends ... so perhaps the only good lesson, then, to learn from the past is caveat lector.

I came across this inset just the other day. It's in the newly-laid-two-years-ago paving stones close by the ... well I won't say where it is, I'll see if any one else has spotted it in Hull. It's an odd, easily overlooked, small thing and I can find nothing about it from the usual channels.